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Shady Past Seeking a White-Collar Job

Do you have any advice for someone who is looking for a white-collar job and has a conviction in his record? How and when should he or she bring it to the attention of the potential employer?

Signed,
Timing is Everything

Dear Timing,

You ask a great question. And while many readers might not be in your exact position, I think all of us have been in a similar situation. It may be that we’re applying for a job and have to explain a long period of unemployment on our resume. It could be that we’re in a performance review and need to put a disastrous project in the context of our larger year’s work. Or perhaps it’s pitching a proposal to a client who might find a gap in our credentials worrisome. Hopefully the advice I offer below will be valuable to people in a variety of situations where they need to acknowledge a fly in their ointment.

Let’s answer the easy questions first. Then I’ll offer a social science principle as a guide for your ultimate decision on timing.

First, you have to bring up your conviction as soon as legally required. For example, if you are asked a direct question in an interview or are required to fill out a form, of course you must disclose whatever you’re legally required to share.

Second, you must do it soon. If you wait too long, you risk the potential employer feeling manipulated or deceived.

Third, with that said, you want to wait to bring it up until you’ve established a mental frame of who you are in the employer’s mind that is much larger than the past offense you committed.

To illustrate the psychological principle behind this, I invite you to try the experiment at this website before reading further. It will take about three minutes and is a lot of fun.

Spoiler alert: If you read further before trying the experiment, you won’t enjoy the video!

If you won’t be watching the video, here’s the gist of it. University of Illinois psychology professor Daniel Simons created a video experiment in which six people—three wearing black shirts and three wearing white—pass a basketball to those wearing the same color shirt. Viewers are asked to count how many times the ball is passed by those wearing white shirts. After a minute, subjects report their count. Then, they are asked if they saw anything unusual. Shockingly, the majority report that they saw nothing other than the black- and white-shirted players passing balls. This is so shocking because when they are invited to view the video again, they are stunned to discover that in the midst of the basketball melee, a person in a gorilla suit walks slowly into the very center of the scene, pounds his chest, then saunters off—and they never saw it!

Human beings use heuristics to improve mental efficiency and decision-making. We distill complex realities into simple rules of thumb. When we’re trying to get a handle on a person sitting in front of us, we develop simple labels such as punctual, athletic, lazy, or likeable. These labels act like an instruction to the brain—watch for basketball passes between white-shirted people—that cause us to filter out data that distract from the simple task we’ve created. From this point forward, we suffer and benefit from selective perception. We can even miss a huge gorilla in the center of our visual field because we’re looking only for information that fits our heuristic.

If you share a psychologically significant piece of data early in your relationship with a potential employer—I won the Nobel prize for literature, or I spent twelve years in a state prison—you’ll establish just such a label that will make it likely that additionally significant information could be discounted or ignored.

My suggestion is that you ensure you have shared memorable positive information early in the relationship that helps distract from the gorilla you’re about to have prance onto the scene. And make sure you share it in a way that is sticky for the interviewers.

In our book, Influencer, we have a chapter called Change How You Change Minds. Our key recommendation is that you master storytelling if you want to learn how to influence strongly held perceptions and move people to action. This principle works every bit as well in a hiring situation. Those who avoid spending time on the facts and figures of their lives and tell two or three compelling stories that communicate who they are as a unique and special human being are far more convincing.

So, come up with your “three people passing a basketball” that you’ll focus your prospect’s attention on. Identify two or three potent stories that introduce them meaningfully to what is special about you. Then let the gorilla walk on the scene and hope they’ll keep it in proportion.

Joseph Grenny is a New York Times bestselling author, keynote speaker, and leading social scientist for business performance. For thirty years, Joseph has delivered engaging keynotes at major conferences including the HSM World Business Forum at Radio City Music Hall. Joseph’s work has been translated into twenty-eight languages, is available in thirty-six countries, and has generated results for three hundred of the Fortune 500. read more

This video provided does not include the fact that our brains can track motion and not background at the same time (see the research being done by Las Vegas magicians and neuroscience researchers). The reason people do not see the gorilla is because they are following the instructions, and count how many times something moves. I should like it if your assessment included the need for redefining what you are looking for in an employee. Rather than looking for the labels, you might want to invite curiosity about what you may be missing about the person since you do have labels for them, or look for evidence that contradicts your opinion.

If you can’t see a huge gorilla becasue your brain can’t track motion and the background at the same time, then it is not the best example of the principle you are illustrating in my “increasingly with age humble opinion”.

I have witnessed this same video being used as to determine who can “think outside the box” and can’t, those who see it being the ones that can think outside the box. What it shows is that those who count the passes accurately are better at following the instructions and less distracted than those whose eyes wander off task and notice the gorilla.
Enjoying your newsletters to no end, thanks for all your good work.

Joseph,
I actually use this exact video when I teach Crucial Conversations.
I my opinion, the current material glosses too quickly over the “see and hear” phase and I spend some time pointing out that we all walk around with a flashlight (what we attend to), blinders (what we miss), big goggles (how we filter) and a screen hanging in front of us like a carrot (what we want and expect) with various other exercises to make the point that you REALLY do need to get other people’s perspective on what should be in the pool because you really have missed alot and it’s not only about what meanings we and others attach.
Stephen

As a prison ministry volunteer my resreach shows that ex cons can get jobs after release even if they refer to their conviction. However if they omit that they were in prison on applications but are asked they can be fired. They can even get employed by the Federal government and obtain clearances depending on the conviction but we are currently received 300 applicaitons for every opening.